Thanks for the info. I'll wait till my drinking buddies are good and drunk before I spring this pearl of knowledge on them!

A few years ago there was a big study about preventing cattle farts by transplanting gut bacteria from Kangaroo. The new study says it won't work because the Roos bacteria are as gassy as the Cattles natural ones.

II Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Thanks for the info. I'll wait till my drinking buddies are good and drunk before I spring this pearl of knowledge on them!

Hey now Plantagenet posted the cow fart picture and you brought it back up a few messages after that. I call foul on complaining about something you yourself encouraged

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

There may be a significant problem with the measuring stick scientists use to account for how much methane is affecting climate change, according to a recent study led by researchers at Oxford University.

The long-term effect of methane emissions might appear to be a lot greater than it really is when compared to carbon dioxide in terms of both gases’ potential to warm the climate. The Oxford researchers suggest a new way to account for methane that highlights the considerable differences in how each gas turns up the atmospheric furnace.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and the way scientists account for its climate impact is critical to the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate the energy industry’s methane emissions. It is also an important part of countries’ emissions reduction pledges under the Paris Climate Agreement.

Using so-called “carbon dioxide equivalents,” scientists commonly account for methane and carbon dioxide as if they are the same, and that has implications for how countries prioritize which climate pollutant to cut.

Should countries concentrate mainly on cutting carbon dioxide emissions, which will have the greatest long-term effect on the climate? Or, should they expend just as much effort cutting methane — a gas that affects the climate a lot more than carbon dioxide in the near future?

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Tanada wrote:Should countries concentrate mainly on cutting carbon dioxide emissions, which will have the greatest long-term effect on the climate? Or, should they expend just as much effort cutting methane — a gas that affects the climate a lot more than carbon dioxide in the near future?

Considering that the "near future" means the next few decades its obvious that efforts should be made to cut methane NOW. Unfortunately, the Obama administrations' short-sighted program of shifting coal-fired electric plants to NG has had the perverse effect of increasing use of NG in the US, and increasing US methane emissions. This is making greenhouse warming worse. Yes there is a reduction in CO2 emissions because you reduce the use of coal---but by switching to NG there is an INCREASE in CH4 emissions, and methane is ca. 50 times more powerful in its Greenhouse warming effect then CO2 is.

The Obama people would've been a lot smarter to shut the coal-fired power plants and shift to solar and wind power instead of NG.

Cheers!

Last edited by Plantagenet on Wed 08 Jun 2016, 13:25:27, edited 1 time in total.

We all know by now that methane is bad for the environment. It's one of those greenhouse gases that trap heat in the earth's atmosphere and contribute to our warming climate. It's regularly emitted during the production and transport of coal and oil, and sometimes even cows get the blame. However, a new study finds that estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay could be contributing significantly more methane to the atmosphere than once thought.

Estuaries and coastal systems are thought to be a relatively small source of atmospheric methane, as little as 3%. However, a new study from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) found that the methane building up in the Chesapeake Bay alone, if released, would be equal to the current estimates for all the estuaries in the world combined.

"This is just one estuary and there are many others that go anoxic in the summertime," said study author Laura Lapham of UMCES' Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. "We need to look at these eutrophic estuaries as perhaps a larger source of methane than we thought. This is a side effect of eutrophication that hasn't been investigated in the Bay."

Since dead zones in the coastal ocean and estuaries are expanding throughout the world, Lapham decided to look at the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States, to understand what happens to methane release in a body of water that undergoes dead zones on a regular basis.

Lapham studied the water at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay over the course of a summer, setting up instruments perched above the mud that would track any signs of methane being released into the water. She found that in anoxic conditions, when there is no oxygen in the bottom layers of the Chesapeake Bay's waters, dissolved methane built up, probably coming from the mud, and when storms mixed up the invisible layers of the Bay's waters, the methane made it to the surface and into the atmosphere.

"Taken together, the time-series data shows that methane flux from the Bay is variable, potentially significant, and dependent upon storms," said Lapham.

... They estimated that 85% of the methane in the bottom water is oxidized in the water column in September.

While most of the built up methane was consumed by the end of the anoxic period, methane concentrations measured in surface water samples in June and September suggest that there was still a significant flux of methane to the atmosphere.

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.

One of the most important outcomes of the antifracking movement may have been that it attracted the attention of a couple of Cornell scientists. Living on the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea got interested in the outcry. While everyone else was focused on essentially local issues—would fracking chemicals get in the water supply?—they decided to look more closely at a question that had never gotten much attention: How much methane was invisibly being leaked by these fracking operations?

Because here’s the unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don’t—if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove—then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2. Howarth and Ingraffea began producing a series of papers claiming that if even a small percentage of the methane leaked—maybe as little as 3 percent—then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.

The trouble for the fracking establishment was that new research kept backing up Howarth and Ingraffea. In January 2013, for instance, aerial overflights of fracking basins in Utah found leak rates as high as 9 percent. “We were expecting to see high methane levels, but I don’t think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see,” said the study’s director.

That’s why last month’s Harvard study came as such a shock. It used satellite data from across the country over a span of more than a decade to demonstrate that US methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. The EPA had been insisting throughout that period that methane emissions were actually falling, but it was clearly wrong—on a massive scale. In fact, emissions “are substantially higher than we’ve understood,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted in early March.

One obvious conclusion from the new data is that we need to move very aggressively to plug as many methane leaks as possible. But, containing the leaks is easier said than done: After all, methane is a gas, meaning that it’s hard to prevent it from escaping. Since methane is invisible and odorless (utilities inject a separate chemical to add a distinctive smell), you need special sensors to even measure leaks. Catastrophic blowouts like the recent one at Porter Ranch in California pour a lot of methane into the air, but even these accidents are small compared to the total seeping out from the millions of pipes, welds, joints, and valves across the country—especially the ones connected with fracking operations, which involve exploding rock to make large, leaky pores. A Canadian government team examined the whole process a couple of years ago and came up with despairing conclusions. Consider the cement seals around drill pipes, says Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, who was a member of the team: “It sounds like it ought to be simple to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’ The technical problem is that when you pour cement into a well and it solidifies, it shrinks. You can get gaps in the cement. All wells leak.”

And if we didn’t frack, what would we do instead? Ten years ago, the realistic choice was between natural gas and coal. But that choice is no longer germane: Over the same 10 years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses, and electric storage batteries. We’ve reached the point where Denmark can generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five years. We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).

We’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas—and a key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States. When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.

To take just one example, an article in Mother Jones based on the WikiLeaks cables reveals what happened when fracking came to Bulgaria. In 2011, the country signed a $68 million deal with Chevron, granting the company millions of acres in shale-gas concessions. The Bulgarian public wasn’t happy: Tens of thousands were in the streets of Sofia with banners reading Stop Fracking With Our Water. But when Clinton came for a state visit in 2012, she sided with Chevron (one of whose executives had bundled large sums for her presidential campaign in 2008). In fact, the leaked cables show that the main topic of her meetings with Bulgaria’s leaders was fracking. Clinton offered to fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people,” and she dispatched her Eurasian energy envoy, Richard Morningstar, to lobby hard against a fracking ban in neighboring Romania. Eventually, they won those battles—and today, the State Department provides “assistance” with fracking to dozens of countries around the world, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.

So if the United States has had a terrible time tracking down and fixing its methane leaks, ask yourself how it’s going to go in Bulgaria. If Canada finds that sealing leaks is an “unresolved engineering challenge,” ask yourself how Cambodia’s going to make out. If the State Department has its way, then in a few years Harvard’s satellites will be measuring gushers of methane from every direction.

Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions “reach their lowest level in 20 years.” It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.

Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.

Natural Gas: Just another scam to keep the fossil-fuel industry in the game. And don't look for help from the government. No matter who wins, they are all corporate stooges. They pledge to the flag of the United Corporations of America.

"For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it." - Patrick Henry

The level of injustice and wrong you endure is directly determined by how much you quietly submit to. Even to the point of extinction.

This is very confusing to me. When I arrived at peakoil.com methane (CO) was a possible energy substitution. It was a good thing and we liked it. Now it seems methane has become a bugaboo A very bad thing I have to wonder why, and if there is an anti-methane meme?

Back then, the idea was to digest animal feed-lot waste solids in a process known as thermal depolymerization (and perhaps also trap said animal farts) as an iput into the Fischer–Tropsch process that converts a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons. What happened to the dream? It is sad

There's nothing deeper than love. In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life,the princesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs

“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.” ― Maya Angelou

pstarr wrote:Back then, the idea was to digest animal feed-lot waste solids in a process known as thermal depolymerization (and perhaps also trap said animal farts) as an iput into the Fischer–Tropsch process that converts a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons. What happened to the dream? It is sad

It is very sad, but shit happens!

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
... Theodore Roosevelt

No, pstarr, there has been a pro-methane meme being foisted upon the world by a fossil-fuel industry that was looking to exploit both Fracking and potential Hydrate mining.

Any bad news about methane has been attacked, attempted to be discredited, suppressed.

Our corporate-owned government was convinced to use a politically expedient solution rather than an otherwise BAU and politically damaging one, to climate change. Convince everyone that methane is a solution not a problem, against all evidence to the contrary.

It worked for a while. Fudge the numbers a bit, manipulate the statistics, point to the left hand, to distract from the right, and wala, the fossil-fuel industry once again makes money hand-over-fist, while contributing to global warming at an even greater pace. All while making it look like they are doing something about climate change.

While before they would pump the oil and flare of the gas, they now have a market for that gas. And crippled the competing coal industry in the process.

Criminal is what this is. (Also brilliant. I would like to meet the person who came up with this.)

Last edited by Cid_Yama on Tue 05 Jul 2016, 21:51:37, edited 1 time in total.

"For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it." - Patrick Henry

The level of injustice and wrong you endure is directly determined by how much you quietly submit to. Even to the point of extinction.

As for the Obama Administration's complicity in this, in the immortal words of the dean of the college in the movie "Back to School" with Rodney Dangerfield, Dean Martin, "Hey Phil, I don't think you realize just how big the check was."

"For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it." - Patrick Henry

The level of injustice and wrong you endure is directly determined by how much you quietly submit to. Even to the point of extinction.

Our corporate-owned government was convinced to use a politically expedient solution rather than an otherwise BAU and politically damaging one, to climate change. Convince everyone that methane is a solution not a problem, against all evidence to the contrary.

It worked for a while. Fudge the numbers a bit, manipulate the statistics, point to the left hand, to distract from the right, and wala, the fossil-fuel industry once again makes money hand-over-fist, while contributing to global warming at an even greater pace. All while making it look like they are doing something about climate change.

While before they would pump the oil and flare of the gas, they now have a market for that gas. And crippled the competing coal industry in the process.

Criminal is what this is. (Also brilliant. I would like to meet the person who came up with this.)

what a complete load of bollicks. The fossil fuel industry has hardly been making money hand over fist from natural gas prices that have been hovering around $3/MMBTU (MCF) for the past number of years. Most of them are struggling to stay alive and count on the liquid fraction to stay above water. And if you actually did some research you would find that methane emissions from oil and gas activities make up only 1/4 of total global methane emissions and are about half or less of total emissions from agriculture (these are numbers from the EPA). Are you arguing that coal somehow has less greenhouse gas contribution than oil and gas activities?

Many independent experiments suggest that a small number of “superemitters” could be responsible for a large fraction of leakage; recent regional atmospheric studies with very high emissions rates are unlikely to be representative of typical NG system leakage rates and assessments using 100-year impact indicators show system-wide leakage is unlikely to be large enough to negate climate benefits of coal-to-NG substitution.

And the list of authors includes scientists from Stanford, the NREL in Golden Co, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, MIT, University of Colorado, University of Calgary, Harvard, Lawrence Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara. So unless you are arguing that somehow all the universities are wrapped up with the US gov’t in this conspiracy scheme you have cooked up I suggest you give your head a shake.

Really, way too idiotic on the face of them to even start. But a tacit admission that he is without any actually valid arguments, so again, a tacit agreement with cid's post.

Once again showing either your inability to read posts or actually understand anything.

It was claimed:

fudge the numbers a bit, manipulate the statistics, point to the left hand, to distract from the right, and wala, the fossil-fuel industry once again makes money hand-over-fist, w

to which I responded that oil companies have hardly made money hand over fist given they are struggling at natural gas prices over the past few years to turn a profit at all. It was also claimed: the gas production has crippled the competing coal industry (this being presented as if it was a bad thing).The paper I pointed to indicated that regardless of there being more methane released from well

asassessments using 100-year impact indicators show system-wide leakage is unlikely to be large enough to negate climate benefits of coal-to-NG substitution.

As well pointing fingers at the oil and gas industry with regards to methane when the total industry only accounts for 1/4 of the emissions is at best ridiculous. Add to that the EPA Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program in 2015 indicated that since 2011 methane emissions from the Petroleum and Natural Gas sector have decreased steadily form 83.6 MM Tonnes to 73.0 million Tonnes during a period where shale gas exploration was rapidly expanding.

In summary:

- oil and gas companies are not making windfall profits from natural gas, they haven't since around 2007- CH4 emissions from oil and gas operations have been decreasing while activity has been increasing- CH4 emissions from oil and gas operations are only 1/4 of the total known emissions. Agriculture makes up a much larger percentage.-CH4 super emitters (single wells with a casing leak much like in California recently) account for the largest proportion of methane release from oil and gas.....fixing a few wells could almost eliminate the problem. The suggestion that all wells leak methane is absolutely absurd.

So perhaps before you call someone an idiot you should do a bit of research and actually look in a mirror.

Note that I did not call you an idiot (as you did to me, thank you very much). That would have been an ad hominem, which, when one engages in that sort of a thing, again you have pretty much conceded the argument.

Soooo, thanks once again for that concession.

But yes, the big fossil-death-fuel companies did not quite get out of this what they thought they were going to. That doesn't mean they didn't try!

Note that I did not call you an idiot (as you did to me, thank you very much). That would have been an ad hominem, which, when one engages in that sort of a thing, again you have pretty much conceded the argument.

and this is how you started your post:

r's arguments here are so idiotic, it's really hard to know where to begin.

pretty sad when you can't even read your own posts and comprehend them.